The Woman Who Paid Kenya to Plant Trees
In 1977, Wangari Maathai planted seven trees in her backyard in Nairobi. It was World Environment Day, and the seedlings were the start of something she had been working out for years. Born in 1940 in the highlands near Nyeri, she had studied in the United States on a scholarship, then returned to Kenya and became the first woman in East and Central Africa to earn a doctorate, in veterinary anatomy, from the University of Nairobi. Along the way she had noticed what was happening to the land of her childhood: streams that used to run year-round had dried up, and the forests that once covered the hillsides had been cleared for tea plantations and cash crops.
The women she met in rural areas described the consequences in plain terms. Firewood was farther away, so they walked longer to fetch it. Clean water was scarcer. Soil washed off bare slopes, and children were eating less well. Maathai's insight was that these were not separate problems, and that the people who felt them most were also the ones who could fix them. Trees would hold the soil, shade the streams and supply fuel, and planting them required nothing more than seedlings, a little instruction and someone willing to dig.
She built the Green Belt Movement around that idea, starting under the National Council of Women of Kenya. Rather than sending in experts, she trained local women to grow seedlings in their own villages and paid them a small sum for each one that survived. The payment mattered as much as the trees. For many participants it was one of the first sources of income they controlled, and the nurseries became places where women learned forestry, bookkeeping and how to organize. Over the following decades the movement grew across Kenya and into other African countries, and its members planted tens of millions of trees.
The work did not stay purely agricultural. Maathai spoke out against land grabbing and the clearing of public forests, and in 1989 she campaigned against a plan to build a sixty-storey office tower in Nairobi's Uhuru Park. The government of President Daniel arap Moi called her disruptive, and she was beaten and arrested more than once in the following years. The tower was never built.
In 2004 she received the Nobel Peace Prize, the first African woman to do so. The committee cited her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace, a combination that had seemed unusual for a person whose main tool was a tree nursery. She died in Nairobi in 2011, aged 71. Many of the trees her movement started are still standing, on hillsides and around schools and farms, and some of them are now old enough to shade the children of the women who first planted them.